This is the web site of Denis Defreyne, a software engineer living in Berlin.
Denis Defreyne
I am a software engineer with extensive experience in backend and frontend development, and comfortable with infrastructure, security, and reliability. I’m good at technical writing, and have a sense of visual design and UX.
I am committed to creating an inclusive culture that’s built on communication and collaboration, and where people can learn and grow.
I use technology only as a means to an end, and what I build will put the user’s needs first, taking into account usability and accessibility.
Experience
Software Engineer, closecontact
Built a privacy-first contact-sharing solution for Berlin clubs
Software Engineer, BCG Digital Ventures
- Defined the technical direction for the internal tools team, striking a balance between business needs and long-term maintenance
- Migrated a legacy system onto a modern frontend stack (React and TypeScript), boosting development speed and quality
- Brought consistency to the design system, and improved accessibility
Software Engineer, Movinga
- Brought consistency to the company’s infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible, reducing infrastructure operating costs by 40–50%
- Introduced monitoring and alerting using Prometheus and Grafana
- Tightened security of applications, services, processes, and infrastructure
- Consolidated deployment onto one container-orchestration platform (AWS ECS)
- Introduced design documents to the engineering department
Software Engineer, SoundCloud
- Built infrastructure for the On SoundCloud partner program, including a flexible logic engine to handle frequently-changing business needs
- Reduced the risk of outages, and ran workshops around incident response
- Set up a central repository for organisation-wide technical documentation
- Introduced design documents to the team, now adopted company-wide
- Worked with the customer support team to improve their processes and tooling
Software Engineer, MediaGeniX NG
Expanded the broadcasting solution for VIMN subsidiaries such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon for divisions in Europe and Southeast Asia
Internships
- At Cyan Worlds, modernized their main game site, bringing it to a #1 search result position, and set up translation workflows across seven languages
- At Netlog, optimized an existing abuse-detection system for social networks
- At dotProjects, developed a web-based machine translation system for large documents
Education
Bachelor of Informatics, Master of Computer Science, Ghent University
Dissertation: Design of a recommendation system for offering services on social-network sites
Community involvement
Mentoring
I have mentored a diverse group of people, as part of CoderDojo, RailsGirls, and SoundCloud’s internship programs.
Public speaking
I regularly give talks, of which Code as data (2018), How to memoize (2018), and Let’s write a parser! (2016) are my personal favorites. For a comprehensive list, see my talks page.